As a tl;dr for people not familiar with web3. Doing things in the web3 that change the Blockchain (like buying nfts for example) has a large cost on "gas" (ie fees you pay for your transaction to be included in the Blockchain). These are more that $30 euros and may go up to $80 euros (depending on what you want to do). So if you want to buy an nft for like $30 you will pay $30 more for the ethereum fees. This makes w…
Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#12Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state mach…
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#13As a tl;dr for people not familiar with web3. Doing things in the web3 that change the Blockchain (like buying nfts for example) has a large cost on "gas" (ie fees you pay for your transaction to be included in the Blockchain). These are more that $30 euros and may go up to $80 euros (depending on what you want to do). So if you want to buy an nft for like $30 you will pay $30 more for the ethereum fees. This makes w…
Why isn't etherium deprecated then and everyone moves to polygon? What's the catch?
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#14Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state mach…
The primary function of finance is to enable economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption, by means of debt. And debt requires a trusted third-party that has the capacity to re-allocate assets. Otherwise the borrower can simply walk away with the money, and never repay the debt. Now, blockchains, not only lack a trusted third-party that can re-allocate assets, but they are designed with the exp…
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#15tldr: because blockchain is too slow for practical uses and one has to resort to off-chain blockchains on blockchain with separate consensus, that go into blockchain. If you’re still confused why would you care about it, so am I.
blockchains are useful because they offer decentralized centralization. Ethereum has no policies, no embargoes, it's a neutral platform. this is because everyone can agree that what's on Ethereum is canon, and everyone can access Ethereum (except for how pricey gas is.)
this is the opposite of federations where servers host their own state, with their own terms and conditions or API keys. everyone can agree on putting things in one place. I think that bit is genuinely useful.
so the major problem is that gas is expensive (and PoW is immoral, but I'll leave that for another time.) gas is cheap on altcoins, but nobody (rightly!) trusts bespoke altcoins because they're too small to be secure.
this L2 stuff is the solution, because rolling up to Ethereum keeps the not-an-altcoin L2 chains honest, along with verifying that their aggregation or challenge protocols or whatever are secure.
whether you find a scalable blockchain useful or not is a different matter, but I think L2 protocols will get it there.
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#16As a tl;dr for people not familiar with web3. Doing things in the web3 that change the Blockchain (like buying nfts for example) has a large cost on "gas" (ie fees you pay for your transaction to be included in the Blockchain). These are more that $30 euros and may go up to $80 euros (depending on what you want to do). So if you want to buy an nft for like $30 you will pay $30 more for the ethereum fees. This makes w…
Why isn't etherium deprecated then and everyone moves to polygon? What's the catch?
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#17Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state mach…
The primary function of finance is to enable economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption, by means of debt. And debt requires a trusted third-party that has the capacity to re-allocate assets. Otherwise the borrower can simply walk away with the money, and never repay the debt. Now, blockchains, not only lack a trusted third-party that can re-allocate assets, but they are designed with the exp…
Most of defi is structured in this way and it is working fine, it works because it IS being integrated and made compatible with existing finance.
This is "futuristic" because anyone in the world has opportunity to lend/borrow to anyone else in the world, to write code that automates savings accounts by rotating these positions, to write business logic of their startup to borrow money when they need and pay it back when its the best time for them - scaling their finance on demand like spinning up an ec2 instance. A system where you have more voice and opportunity for your work/savings/co-op/club, compared with whatever the state of banking is in wherever you happen to be born in the world.
Concrete example: I asked my bank to borrow some money and showed them my bitcoin, they predictably said no because their system cant handle it. I wrapped it onto ethereum, deposited it in aave, borrowed usdc, withdrew to my bank account and carried on with my life without needing the banks permissions. The people lending that usdc to aave to lend out to me know it is safe and I cant run off never paying back my debts and interest (otherwise they get my over-collateralized btc).
permissionless global p2p lending and borrowing. it isn't futuristic, it is the present. ill never understand why "hacker"news doesnt find that amazing.
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#18Kneejerk dismissals here are sad to see. L2 is, in my view, some of the most interesting research happening in computer science right now. The article above is not a great explanation--in particular, L2s are not off-chain as the article presents. The point of L2 is that it on-chain, inheriting the security and censorship resistance guarantees of L1. To simplify: L2 is about creating a fast, high throughput state mach…
The primary function of finance is to enable economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption, by means of debt. And debt requires a trusted third-party that has the capacity to re-allocate assets. Otherwise the borrower can simply walk away with the money, and never repay the debt. Now, blockchains, not only lack a trusted third-party that can re-allocate assets, but they are designed with the exp…
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#19tldr: because blockchain is too slow for practical uses and one has to resort to off-chain blockchains on blockchain with separate consensus, that go into blockchain. If you’re still confused why would you care about it, so am I.
a defense of it, from someone who's not in the cryptocurrency scene: blockchains are useful because they offer decentralized centralization. Ethereum has no policies, no embargoes, it's a neutral platform. this is because everyone can agree that what's on Ethereum is canon, and everyone can access Ethereum (except for how pricey gas is.) this is the opposite of federations where servers host their own state, with the…
Re: Why should you care about Ethereum Layer-2?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The primary function of finance is to enable economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption, by means of debt. And debt requires a trusted third-party that has the capacity to re-allocate assets. Otherwise the borrower can simply walk away with the money, and never repay the debt. Now, blockchains, not only lack a trusted third-party that can re-allocate assets, but they are designed with the exp…
Loans are an important concept, that's true. Do blockchains inherently prevent loans? I'm not sure, I think Ethereum smart contracts enable the concept of loans. The 3rd party here is the contract itself, as I understand it.